Microsoft to Acquire Powerset 2 — We're excited to announce officially that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Powerset. — Powerset has always been a small company with big dreams, with the ultimate goal of changing the way humans interact with computers through language.

Microsoft's Plan B for Search — Moving past the Yahoo saga, the software giant is buying semantic search engine Powerset as a way of closing the gap with Google — Still smarting from a failed attempt to buy Yahoo! (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT) is trying another tactic to gain on Google (GOOG) in Web search.

Gnip: Grand Central Station for the Social Web — Ping, ping, ping! That's the sound made day and night by the new social media technologies rapidly proliferating around the web... and the machines are getting tired. Polling for updates to user data streams, wishing they spoke the same language …

Gnip Launches To Ease The Strain On Web Services — MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier sold his company to Yahoo in January 2007 for an estimated $10 million. He left Yahoo in July 2007 with the seed of a new idea germinating in his head - “Make data portability suck less.”

AT&T announces iPhone 3G pricing plans — Finally, a piece of news we can actually do something with. AT&T today announced its pricing structure for the next iteration of Apple's iPhone. There's not much that's surprising here — new customers and those eligible for an upgrade will be able …

A Cringing Quarter for Venture Capitalists — As I reported Saturday, venture capitalists experienced a very poor second quarter. The industry's trade association said Tuesday that for the first time since 1978, not a single venture-backed company went public in the quarter.

Google learns to crawl Flash — Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we've improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology.

Bag Helps Laptop Pass Air Security — For years at airport security checkpoints, passengers have heard the refrain, almost a dirge: “Laptops must be removed from their cases and placed on the belt.” — Get ready for a change. The Transportation Security Administration has given the go-ahead …

Engadget's Ryan Block and Peter Rojas To Team On New Startup — Engadget's editor-in-chief Ryan Block will be leaving parent company AOL shortly, sources say, to launch a new startup. Partnering with him on the new company will be Peter Rojas, Engadget's former editor-in-chief (pictured left below, next to Block).

Mozilla Releases Weave 0.2: Filling in for Browser Sync — Not too long ago, Google announced that it was going to stop the development of its Browser Sync project. Browser Sync automatically synchronized bookmarks between different computers. Mozilla just announced a new version …

AOL For Sale (TWX)* — At a meeting with about a dozen senior members of AOL's staff yesterday, Jeff Bewkes left at least one member of management with the impression that the company is for sale, a source close to the company says. — Another person who attended the same meeting says Jeff …

Apple Spurns Intel, For Now — SAN FRANCISCO - — One of Intel's top technologists revealed Monday that the chip giant will not win a spot on Apple's iconic iPhone anytime soon, even as he outlined Intel's plans to keep growing as it turns 40 on July 18.

Hulu: A Consumer Success But Still A Small Business — Since Hulu launched three months ago, it has become a consumer success, joining Nielsen's top-10 video sites, and serving more video in May than ABC.com. — What does that mean in terms of gross ad sales for the NBC U - News Corp. JV?

Amazon: Hey Spammers, Get Off My Cloud! — I am accustomed to receiving e-mail from Amazon.com, as I am a fiercely loyal customer who shops there quite frequently. But it took me by surprise this weekend to discover that that mounds of porn spam and junk e-mail laced with computer viruses …

Crash Bandicoot Comes Racing to iPhone 2.0 — It looks like the iPhone gaming scene is getting more solid by the day: Crash Bandicoot is the latest famous franchise that is going to appear at the app store in the form of Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart, a racing game that—looking at the demo video …